Spanish Army

The Spanish Army  are the armed forces of the Kingdom of Castile (1492-1519), the Habsburg Empire (1519-1559), Spanish Empire (1559-1899), the Kingdom of Spain (1700-1923), the Republic of Spain (1923-1939), the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), and Spain (1975-present).

History
Spain became a unified nation only after six centuries of fighting between the Muslim and Christian princely states of the Iberian Peninsula, unified by the Conquest of Granada in 1492. The Spanish Army was a strong force and one of the first to use firearms, fighting in Italy in the early 1500s and taking over all of Lombardy and Naples & Sicily. United with the Holy Roman Empire by the rule of Charles I of Spain (1519-1559), Spain was the dominant power in Europe for decades. Their army took over most of Central and South America from 1521 to 1699 but they were defeated by France in the Thirty Years' War and the Wars of Louis XIV. Eventually, the Spanish Army reformed and they fought once more in many European conflicts as an ally and enemy of France in the 1700s.

From 1808 to 1814 many of the Spanish Army in Spain were either incorporated into the French occupation army of Napoleon during the Peninsular War or joined the resistance movements in the south of Spain along with the British. In the Americas, the Spanish Army fought against the Haitian rebels during the Haitian Revolution or were occupied with fighting rebels in their own countries in South America from 1810 to 1826. They were evicted eventually and ceased to play a major role in world politics after the loss of their remaining American possessions to the United States in 1898.

From then onwards, they had only the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco in their hands. The Rif War of the 1920s was a disaster for them, and they required the intervention of French general Philippe Petain to crush the rebels of Abd el-Krim. In 1923 a republican government under the king was formed, but the King lost power as the people took advantage of the disunity to create the Popular Front in 1934. In 1936 Moroccan army units of the Army of Africa rebelled under Francisco Franco, and by 1939 they had taken over the whole of Spain and crushed the Basque Republic.

Spain underwent a series of goverment changes afterwards, with Franco ruling as the Falange dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975, when he told Juan Carlos, a Bourbon noble, that he would be the new ruler as a King. In the 1940s a Blue Division fought for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front in the name of Hitler's Spanish allies. Afterwards Juan Carlos reversed these reforms and he became the most beloved Spanish (including Spanish American) ruler in the world.